Battle resumes over 'fracking protection zones' in North Yorkshire

Battle resumes over 'fracking protection zones' in North Yorkshire

Ryedale district councillor Paul Andrews joins residents of Kirby Misperton and campaigners outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London, where they are challenging one of the first planning applications to carry out fracking. PRESS ASSOCIATION

AN intense battle over how much protection communities should be granted from exposure to fracking operations has resumed.

Amid tight security in a packed council chamber at County Hall, lawyers lined up alongside shale gas companies, including Ineos, Cuadrilla and Third Energy, green energy campaigners, residents and planning authorities to debate the county’s proposed mineral extraction policies.

Since North Yorkshire’s minerals and waste plan was examined in public last April, the Government has issued a ministerial statement on shale gas and the hearing was reopened for two days to examine whether the Whitehall guidance would impact on plan developed jointly by North Yorkshire and City of York councils and the North York Moors National Park Authority.

The key issue facing the hearing followed the Government statement that planners should not set thresholds or have areas within their minerals extraction plans that unjustifiably restrict shale gas development, while the county’s proposed plan had set out a 500m buffer zone between shale gas developments and homes and other sensitive buildings, such as hospitals and schools.

The hearing, the conclusions of which could shape planning policy on fracking across the UK, saw industry representatives show an interactive map of what the impact of the 500m buffer zone would be. They said the effect of the buffer policy would be to “sterilise” 80 per cent of their gas exploration licence area.

They said there was no justification for the buffer zones and the 500m limit that had been set was arbitrary.

Campaigners and the planning authorities told examiner Elizabeth Ord that the claims the proposed minerals policy would create “no-go areas” were nonsense.

Speaking outside the hearing, Chris France, planning director for the national park, around which a 3.5km buffer zone has been proposed, said: “We’re saying that when an energy firm is within 500m of where somebody lives they’re going to have to increase the mitigation measures to stop that development impacting on that property.”

The planning authorities said firms could laterally frack and site surface developments outside the buffer zone and still access the gas under people’s houses from 2.5km away.

The hearing also featured lengthy debate between acoustics experts over the impact of noise at different distances.

Energy firms said they could fully mitigate against noise and showed the hearing a photograph of a gas rig close to a house, but separated by a stack of shipping containers.

Mr France said: “It clearly would reduce the noise, but you have still got shipping containers bang next door to where somebody lives. The mitigation in itself can have a harmful amenity impact.”

After speaking at the hearing, Mayor of Malton Councillor Paul Andrews added the 500m buffer zones were essential to “balance the interests of residents against those of the industry, because the industry want to build multi-acre fracking sites right up to the fences of anybody’s and everybody’s back yard”.

He added: “Five hundred metres is not far enough, it should be a mile. We have a Government paper that says house prices will fall by seven per cent within a mile of any extraction site.”

Ahead of concluding on the proposed minerals and waste plan, Ms Ord has asked to visit Cuadrilla’s Preston New Road site in Lancashire, where fracking was halted last month following a series of earthquakes.

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